GRANDMA ON HER 134th BIRTHDAY

She always wore her long hair rolled up in a bun on the back of her head, except when she slept.  

LILLIAN "LILLIE" DELIAH MILLS KNOTT

1890-1971

daughter of 

James Stephen Mills

1856-1903

and

Elizabeth Ann Basket

1861-1911

On Monday of this week, January 8, we celebrated the Baptism of The Lord. On Friday of this week, January 12, I will celebrate my deceased paternal grandmother's 134th birthday. What do they have in common, you might ask? As a country midwife, my grandmother is the woman who delivered me and baptized me when I was in danger of death right after I was born. I was thrilled that she got to attend my first Mass even though she died exactly one year later! When I celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, I always think of her!

I always considered us having a special relationship. She lived across the road from us in my earliest years growing up in Rhodelia. I was always running back and forth across the road from our house to hers. I never knocked. I just walked in as if it were a branch location of my own home. I don't remember her talking all that much, but she was always teaching me something new. 

Around 1950, at age six, she taught me to churn butter for her in front of her new TV. She taught me how to grind sausage for her by turning the crank of the manual sausage grinder as she fed chunks of meat into it. Most memorable of all, she taught me to raise a vegetable garden by giving me a small piece of ground next to hers to raise my own little garden. She gave me the seeds, showed me how to plant them and let me use her hand plow to cultivate my little garden.  

She let me watch her make homemade soap outside in a huge black cauldron heated by a wood fire underneath. With a pocket knife, I watched her shave off curls of her homemade soap into the washing machine when she did laundry. She let me watch her render lard and taste the "cracklings" after the lard was pressed out of the pork cubes that were heated until they released their oil. What was left, after squeezing, resembled what people today would call the snack food "pork rinds." She always planted a row or two of flowers in her garden which she showed me how to tend. 

Even though she belonged to a group of women, informally called the "Rhodelia Homemakers," who met to "quilt" homemade quilts, to gossip a bit and to enjoy a pot luck lunch together (to which I was not invited nor wanted to attend), I did manage on occasion to crash the free lunch part - at least at the point when dessert was served! 

I clearly remember one particular day when she totally shocked me. She had an aggravating old rooster that was causing chaos in her chicken yard. All of a sudden, she reached out, grabbed it, wrung its neck, pulled its head off and let if flop around on the ground until it was dead. She looked at me and asked, "Guess what we are having for supper?" Answering her own question, she proudly replied "Chicken and dumplings!" Witnessing that sudden and unexpected turn of events, I was torn between shock and admiration! She didn't go looking for trouble from that mean old rooster, but she dealt with its trouble-making ways with quick and amazing finesse! 

If all this sounds like a TV episode of The Waltons, you are not too far off. Rhodelia, a town of less than 50 people in the early 1950s, would have made a perfect "set" for that TV production. We had a country store with a tiny post office inside. The postman even delivered live chicks and brought our school clothes ordered out of the annual Sears and Roebuck catalogue. If you needed a ride somewhere on his route, you could catch a ride with him for free. The country store had two gas pumps (regular or ethel). You could sell your cow's milk and eggs at the store where they "candled" the eggs (rolled them over a light box, one at a time, to make sure they did not have chicken embryos already growing inside) and tested milk for levels of butter fat content in its backroom "creamery" before it was picked up to truck on to a larger creamery business in Louisville. Today, I own that very egg-candling gadget (a tin can with an electric light bulb inside) they used back then to check the eggs for freshness - which I did quite often when I had a little "job" at  Harold and Verna Vessels' Country Store right beside our house.  

OK! So what if I am a "hick from the sticks" as some of my fellow high school seminarians here in Louisville called those of us coming from rural areas back in 1958? I am proud of my vivid memories of those early childhood experiences, especially those revolving around my "Grandma Knott" who delivered and baptized me the day I was born and who lived long enough to attend my "first Mass!"